Fox News host Tucker Carlson made the argument Thursday night that the MS-13 criminal gang that has wreaked havoc on inner cities across the country poses “a far greater threat” to Americans than the Islamic State terrorist group.

Speaking on his eponymous TV news program, Mr. Carlson said the ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks in Orlando, San Bernardino and Chattanooga led to the deaths of 68 people, but that is “nothing compared” to the murders carried out by MS-13 members.

“That organization, a mostly immigrant street gang, is a far greater threat to your life than ISIS is. It’s the numbers,” he said in a clip posted by Breitbart.

Mr. Carlson mentioned several MS-13-related murders in New York that have popped up in the news recently, including the slaying of four young men this week in Central Islip and last month’s double murder of two teenage girls in Brentwood. MS-13 is also suspected in the murders of three teenage boys whose skeletal remains were found last month in Brentwood. MS-13 gang

“But killing is not the end of the problem with MS-13. Its members have been caught running child prostitution rings, they’ve been contacted by Mexican drug cartels and paid to run torture operations, and of course, they engage in the usual extortion, drug trafficking and human smuggling,” Mr. Carlson said.

“But unlike ISIS, MS-13 makes it hard to live in certain neighborhoods here in this country,” he continued. “Also unlike ISIS, there are a lot of them. ISIS may have significant passive support in the U.S., and a lot of us suspect it does, but [the number of] true active ISIS members [is] pretty small, maybe a few hundred at most. MS-13, by contrast, has at least 6,000 members according to the government in this country. And they’re supported by more than 30,000 abroad. Yes, abroad, because MS-13 is fundamentally a foreign threat.”